heavenali

One of the reasons I chose to give myself a little reading project for 2024, was to help revitalise my enthusiasm for blogging. Although I read slower than I once did, my enthusiasm for that at least has never waned. Writing about the books I read has become more of an issue. However, despite my enjoyment of my Margaret Drabble reading this year – I haven’t even managed to write about all of the books I’ve read in full. The Realms of Gold was one of the books I read in May that I most wanted to write about. It’s a fairly complex novel – though not especially difficult to read, so I only hope I can do it some justice. It was an easy five star read for me, layers of brilliance and multiple themes with a strong, likeable heroine. 

Frances Wingate is a successful archeologist, divorced with children, she has recently separated from her married lover Karel – despite knowing she loves him. The novel opens as Frances is abroad to deliver a lecture at an academic conference. Alone in her hotel room she remembers her relationship with Karel and their parting a few months earlier – willing him to come back to her. Karel’s marriage is very unhappy, and Frances believes Karel and she should be together, and yet, she ended their relationship almost on a whim. There’s a flashback to a rather unpleasant incident between Karel and his wife, which shows him ‘beating her up’ in frustrated fury – no doubt, it is indicative of the 1970s, that we are supposed to see this as a forgivable one off by a man driven to distraction and deeply unhappy. There are some things in books that don’t stand the test of time so well. There are a few sections of the novel told from Karel’s POV and he is a pretty decent guy, nothing like the above incident might suggest – it’s the kind of thing that is confusing for modern readers. Things like this don’t spoil books for me, they give me something else to think about – the wider context being a sociological one perhaps. There’s another male character in the book who is far more problematic – there’s no suggestion of violence, yet Drabble portrays him as controlling and difficult with chilling accuracy. I find the difference in Drabble’s own attitude to these men quite interesting. 

Frances frequently suffers bouts of depression, depression we discover runs in the family, but Frances has learned to live it with, clawing her way out of it bit by bit. 

“She still didn’t feel exactly cheerful, though the worst was over. She walked up and down for half an hour or more, muttering to herself, trying to divert the energy of the experience to some more useful end, but she was exhausted. It was, after all, as though some bad weather had passed over her, leaving her a little flattened, like a field after heavy rain. It would take her some time to shake it off and slowly uncrackle and unfurl herself again. Meanwhile, she walked up and down, and had another drink.”

Frances is a real grown up, she’s a strong, intelligent woman, who manages her career and four children with seeming ease. Her work focuses a lot on landscape and she has some passionate beliefs in the importance of landscape for the civilisations of the past. Some of the themes of this novel involve revealing the truths of the past, civilizations and their rituals, like marriage or funeral rites, the raising of children and supporting other relatives. 

“Too much of the world was inhospitable, intractable… Why prove that it had ever once been green?”

Before flying home, Frances decides to send Karel a postcard telling him she loves him, sure that the mere sight of it will bring him back to her. There has been a postal strike in the country where the conference is being held but Frances doesn’t take that into account at all. Once at home she resumes her usual normal family life – waiting for Karel to get in touch. She visits her parents, and her brother, who has struggled with depression, and solved it with drink. She worries about her nephew Stephen who has found himself with a wife and baby while still very young, and with his wife hospitalised for a mental health condition, he is trying to manage everything on his own. In time we see Frances was right to be concerned. There is another academic conference on the horizon, and by the time she leaves, she still hasn’t heard from Karel. 

Interestingly, we also get a glimpse of some of Frances’ unknown relatives in the East Midlands. David; a distant cousin, is a geologist, working very much within the same world as Frances; he is in the audience when she gives her speech at the start of the novel As Frances still uses her married name, he has no idea of the family connection, and it isn’t until later in the novel, at another academic conference in Africa that they finally meet. Frances makes a kind of pilgrimage to the rural East Midlands town of Tockley where she and her brother holidayed as children, not realising there is a cousin living just down the road who she passes in the street. We meet this cousin, Janet, living in what feels like a small, stifling Lincolnshire town, coping with the rigours of a young baby, married to a rather horrible, slightly controlling man, (who I referred to above) who is virtually no help at all, and has stripped away any confidence that Janet might have once had, she dislikes sex and tries to avoid his nightly, advances.

“Her neighbour was a constant threat to her, and she would avoid encounters if she possibly could. It was not that there was anything overtly threatening about her – on the contrary, it was her very meekness that constituted the menace. She was an awful warning,  – poor Jean Cooper, of what Janet herself so nearly was timid, nervous, gauche, sad, unfinished. She lived in the downstairs flat of the house next door, with her silent husband, and she was going mad, Janet thought, from boredom, so mad that she would even overcome her shyness to talk endlessly, nervously, over the garden hedge.”

 Later, when an unexpected family crisis brings her home from the African conference early, Frances meets Janet, and on meeting the husband, knows just what kind of man he is. 

Drabble weaves all these strands together brilliantly, her world becomes immersive and Frances was a pleasure to spend time with. What a fascinating writer Margaret Drabble is. 

Many of you will remember that I pledged to read Margaret Drabble novels during 2024 – hoping for at least one a month. The Waterfall is my fifth Drabble of the year. I’m sorry to see that this one seems to be currently out of print, and wasn’t among those that Canongate reissued a couple of years ago. My blogging has been so erratic that I haven’t even reviewed all of them, however although I have really enjoyed them all, the book I read last month, Jerusalem, the Golden, was the one I have enjoyed least. Still I am constantly impressed by Drabble’s skill as a writer, her narrators are realistic, though not always likeable – and in this case not entirely reliable. 

The Waterfall is described as one of her most experimental novels – it is a literary novel of course, and quite a slow read, although I didn’t find it difficult. I found Drabble’s prose immersive and her narrator quite compelling – though typically she is a flawed and sometimes irritating character. The novel is told in both the first and third person, the point of view is always that of Jane Grey – the central character – but the switching from first to third person perhaps allows Drabble to play with the reliability of the narrator. 

“Learning was so dangerous: for how could one tell in advance, while still ignorant, whether a thing could ever be unlearned or forgotten, or if, once known and named, it would invalidate by its significance the whole of one’s former life, all of those years wiped out, convicted at one blow, retrospectively darkened by one sudden light?”

This is a novel about love – the love a woman, Jane feels is such a necessity it becomes all consuming. The novel opens just as Jane is about to give birth to her second child, shortly after having been left by her husband. Jane’s marriage to Malcolm has not been happy, and she is quite glad to see the back of him. She has a small son Laurie and within the first few pages, gives birth to Bianca.  While Jane is in bed recovering from the birth of her daughter, she is cared for by her cousin Lucy and her husband James. They take it in turns to stay with Jane, as they themselves have three young children. Very quickly an intimacy develops between Jane and James that considering she has just given birth feels rather inappropriate, in more ways than one.  

“She was prepared to spend all the rest of the evenings of her life alone, but the next night, after the midwife and Lucy had left, she was surprised to hear a knock on the door. She had to get up and go down to open it, and she found James standing there on the step. She was weak with relief at the sight of him: she had been afraid as she descended the stairs that it might have been her husband. She tried to conceal her relief, but she was so overcome that she could hardly stand.”

James continues to spend time with Jane and the children, long after she has ceased needing support, the two locked in a passionate affair – which Jane seems to have convinced herself that Lucy knows all about somehow. Drabble portrays this relationship wholly from Jane’s point of view and reveals how for Jane there is an intense sexuality in her feelings for James – which are so very different to how she had felt about Malcolm. Jane is a poet, though she hasn’t published anything recently, she is often crippled by self doubt and feelings of inadequacy. Her love for James is transcendent in how it makes her feel – she shrugs off any lingering feelings of guilt, convinced she is right, putting any negative feelings right away from her. It is interesting in how there are subtle differences in aspects of the first and third person narratives, as if the truth is told from the third person perspective, while Jane, in her first person narrative is more protective of herself and less honest about what is going on, and who James really is. He fixes a couple of simple things in the house for Jane and promptly acquires almost legendary status – while gradually the reader begins to see him as more feckless. There are references to Jane Eyre and Rochester – as Jane insists on seeing James as her romantic lead.  

“She felt she was taking part in some elaborate delicate ritual, and that if she broke some small unknown rule of it, by a false word or touch, by a treacherous mention of Lucy or Malcolm, by a murmur of indignation at his leaving, by a too willing acceptance of that same leaving, then he would be taken from her, she would forfeit him for her unwitting transgression.” 

Along with her powerful depiction of a love affair – and Jane’s love for James is wholly convincing at least. Drabble is realistic about the daily minutiae of motherhood and modern life. The atmosphere she creates between Jane and James in the early pages of the book is beautifully done. Again we see a beautifully crafted and realistic relationship between a young mother and her tiny children. We know a crisis must come, and it is well highlighted in some blurbs. An accident – occurring a good way through the novel – forces their affair into the open, and the consequences have to be faced. 

I thought this was an enormously impressive novel about love and obsession, it is a shame that Canongate didn’t reissue this one – I see from Goodreads that it has divided some readers, but perhaps that is the sign of a good book.